By the FinLingo Team | Capital markets practitioner, front office experience at a major European investment bank. FinLingo covers 342 lessons from bonds to exotic derivatives. About · Last updated:
Structuring is one of the most technical roles in investment banking. The interview tests your ability to decompose products, reason about pricing, and understand the Greeks. Here is a concrete 6-week plan that covers what you need.
Cover the asset classes: equities, fixed income, FX, rates, credit. Understand what a bond is, how duration works, what drives the yield curve. Learn the basics of forwards and futures: the no-arbitrage pricing formula F = S · e^(rT). Do not skip this. Every structured product is built on these foundations. FinLingo Level 1 (50 units) covers this in roughly 2.5 hours of study at 3 units per day.
Swaps, options, and hedging. Understand IRS mechanics (fixed vs floating, par swap rate). Master options: calls, puts, payoffs, put-call parity. Learn the five Greeks at an intuitive level: what each measures, how each behaves. You should be able to answer "what happens to delta as the stock approaches the strike near expiry?" without hesitating. FinLingo Level 2 (39 units).
Black-Scholes: understand the formula, the five inputs, and what happens when each input changes. Implied volatility: what it is, how it is extracted, why it differs from realised vol. Then structured products: decompose a CPN (ZCB + call), a BRC (bond + DI put), an Autocall (digital coupons + DI put + auto-redemption trigger). Practice explaining each in 60 seconds. FinLingo Levels 3–5.
Check market levels: 10Y Treasury, EUR swap rates, VIX, major equity indices. Review the five most common structuring questions and your answers. Practice the CPN decomposition with actual numbers: "At 3.2% rates over 5 years, the ZCB costs 85.3%, leaving 12.7% for the call after 2% margin." Know the numbers, not just the concepts.
Six weeks at 15 to 20 minutes per day is a realistic timeline for a candidate with basic finance knowledge (what a stock and bond are). This covers market foundations, derivatives mechanics, Greeks, and the key structured products. Candidates with existing derivatives knowledge can compress to 3 to 4 weeks by starting at Level 2.
Product decomposition (CPN, BRC, Autocall into building blocks), Greeks intuition (delta as hedge ratio, gamma near expiry, vega and vol), and pricing reasoning (how rates affect the ZCB cost, how vol affects option prices, why barrier-coupon curves are nonlinear). You need both the concepts and the numbers.
Product knowledge with quantitative intuition. You do not need to derive Black-Scholes from Ito lemma. You do need to decompose a CPN with actual numbers, explain why the Autocall coupon rises with vol, and compute a delta-hedged P&L scenario. The math supports the product reasoning, not the other way around.
FinLingo Levels 1–5 map directly to this 6-week plan. 342 lessons, each 3–5 minutes, on your phone. Level 1 is free.
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